Aussie corporates flirt with Gmail

Australian IT services firm SMS Management and Technology lastweek claimed to be fielding decent levels of interest from large Australianorganisations interested in dumping their existing email platformsand migrating to Google's Gmail service.

Australian IT services firm SMS Management and Technology last
week claimed to be fielding decent levels of interest from large Australian
organisations interested in dumping their existing email platforms
and migrating to Google's Gmail service.

Paul Cooper(Credit: SMS)

The news comes in the wake of the New South Wales Department of
Education and Training's announcement in late June that it would
dump Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange platform and move its 1.3
million school students to Gmail, partnering with SMS to do so.
Macquarie University has also adopted Gmail.

"There's been a fair bit of interest from the other education
services around Australia," SMS industry director of business
solutions Paul Cooper told ZDNet.com.au last week. The executive
added some of the largest Australian city councils were also
looking at the Gmail option.

"My sense is that there's a number of eyes on the NSW
solution, and I get the feeling that they [other groups] will
certainly want to have a look at the success and how that operates
first," he added.

Google has so far struggled to gain traction in Australia with
its corporate office suite, which includes the hosted Gmail service
as well as calendaring, word processing, spreadsheet tools and
other offerings suitable for business use.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has evaluated some aspects of
Google's platform but found them wanting, while other smaller
firms such as winemaker De Bortoli have also flirted with the
technology.

Cooper said SMS was seeing a good deal of interest in using
Google's offerings to reduce costs. But he said the "sleeper"
functionality in the services was the ability to link the search
giant's tools with other applications in a technique known as
creating "mashups".

"The Google model, out of the box, is very compatible with this
type of approach," he said.

One potential roadblock to adoption could be the cost of
international data traffic to access data hosted on Google's servers
oversees. Cooper declined to comment on whether Google had
investigated hosting servers in Australia, but said the cost would
vary between organisations.

Cooper said the Google suite would be of interest to medium-sized businesses who don't want to set up their own infrastructure, especially groups up to 1,000 staff, or organisations such as education departments who simply had to provide vast numbers of email accounts.

However large companies with "complex" requirements would probably stick with traditional suites such as Outlook for the time being.

The executive said the Google product was particularly suited to
being partnered with mid-tier IT services firms like SMS. Industry
titans such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM or Electronic Data Systems,
normally worked closely with traditional software vendors such as Microsoft
or Oracle.

Cooper said SMS was supplying its usual type of high-end services such as project and change management around the Google suite. In comparison, he said he suspected larger firms were struggling to work out how to make money from the new hosted Web 2.0-style applications such as Gmail.